Use Service Contracts To Generate New Sales

What would you do if you were a community bank with limited IT staff that was losing its chief information officer? When a start-up community bank in Atlanta — one that markets its technology-savvy approach to banking — found itself in that situation, its leadership immediately started looking for help. A referral from a banking industry peer led them to Safe Systems, a systems integrator that works solely in the banking vertical and that, just last year, expanded to become a managed services provider.

“We found this customer in a situation where they had lost their CIO and nearly all IT oversight had gone with him,” explains Curt Frierson, EVP for technology and education at Safe Systems. The CIO was also in the midst of about 20 IT projects, and frankly, the bank just wasn’t sure where it stood and what it needed to tackle first in terms of its network technology. “They asked us to help them understand the technology processes they had in place and where they were with these active projects,” says Frierson. To address the bank’s need, Safe Systems assessed its entire IT network. While an assessment is typical of the service the systems integrator offers its customers, its approach has evolved since the company added managed services and began to use the Kaseya Managed Services Edition platform. “We used to do it all manually — we’d go to the site and interview personnel and complete a network audit using software inventory tools and vulnerability scanning software,” explains Frierson. “But now we use Kaseya and just deploy that product’s agents onto the customer’s network to collect the same data without all the manual processes.” Once Safe Systems had evaluated the network, the company presented the bank’s CFO and its VP of operations with an overview of the bank’s technology environment and a managed services proposal based on the network assessment. “They were considering hiring an IT staff, but when we proposed our service agreement, they saw that as a good alternative,” explains Frierson.

SLA Leaves Door Open To Future Installations
Today, the bank has in place a platinum service agreement with Safe Systems, its top-of-the-line managed services agreement. In all, Safe Systems offers three levels of service agreements, each tailored for specific situations and supported by Kaseya’s managed services product. The platinum agreement signed by the bank includes monitoring and remediation for all devices. Because the bank has no internal IT staff, the platinum agreement was a good fit. For those customers with some IT support in-house, Frierson recommends Safe Systems’ gold agreement, which offers monitoring and remediation for servers and network devices, but not work stations. Lastly, Safe Systems offers Kaseya’s managed services product as a tool — its silver agreement offering. In those cases, Safe Systems deploys the product, trains the customer’s staff, and monitors the system, but remediation is handled by the customer.
In addition to the managed services agreement Safe Systems signed with the bank, the systems integrator installed antivirus and remote access solutions. It also tackled the largest of the bank’s outstanding IT projects, an upgrade to a core application that handles its customer transactions. That project, which took several months, is nearing completion. While he isn’t aware of any future projects that Safe Systems may be tasked with outside the services agreement, Frierson says he expects his company to be the natural choice if those opportunities arise.

While Safe Systems is well-established in the banking vertical, with nearly all its business generated via referrals, one unique aspect of this deployment may be helpful as Safe Systems pursues new customers. “The technology this bank was using was somewhat unusual for a bank of this size,” says Frierson.  The customer’s use of thin-client devices, its decision to house its disaster recovery solution in a collocation facility, and its ability to host its own website internally clearly reflected the bank’s desire to use technology as a differentiator. “While we have implemented these solutions many times before, we found that we were able to provide more value by implementing a comprehensive solution to manage those layers of technology,” says Frierson. The end result is that Safe Systems can now demonstrate the value of this technology and is using that as part of a current bid for a new deal with a bank using the same thin-client devices.
www.safesystems.com
www.kaseya.com